[WikiEN-l] Oversized criticism sections and WP:UNDUE (was: Notability and ski resorts)

[Surreptitiousness]

Carcharoth wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 10:22 PM, Surreptitiousness
> <surreptitious.wikipedian at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>   
>> Having just nullified a load of inactive proposals, I can attest to
>> that.  I was wondering if there was a better way to organise historical
>> and rejected proposals, but after a moment's thought I filed it away as
>> too much work for too little return.
>>     
>
> But then consider the time wasted when someone writes up the same
> proposal again (or something similar), under a different title,
> without realising the idea has already been rejected, or at least
> discussed before? If you organise the rejected ideas, you might begin
> to see a pattern, and to be able to identify the areas where new ideas
> come up most often, or which ideas are truly perennial, and work
> forward from there?
>
>   
Yeah, or I could have a life.  We're here to write an encyclopedia, not 
propose more and more ways of how to write an encyclopedia. Maybe we 
could just go back to the old system where people propose things at the 
village pump, that way people wouldn't waste too much time. I'm hard 
pressed to imagine an idea that has not, at some point in time, already 
been proposed. But then I am becoming aware I am part of the problem.  
Feel free to categorise all those proposals.
> <snip>
>
>   
>> Having invested a large amount of time on a howled down proposal,
>> WP:ATT, I need no reminder of that. I tried to poke some sort of life
>> back into the Wikipedia:Advisory Council on Project Development but it
>> didn;t come to aught.  I think that one is going to die, no-one wants to
>> take it forwards.
>>     
>
> What about the alternatives to the ACPD that were set up at the time?
> Do any of them show any signs of life either? My big point at the end
> of all that was that if several such bodies were given the chance to
> grow and develop, surely one of them would succeed. If the answer is
> in fact that *all* of them failed, that will be depressing.
>   
Do you have medication? I think the only one that looks like it may have 
any sign of life is an attempt to merge centralised discussions with 
mediation.  At least that's what I think Wikipedia:Community 
Facilitation is, and I say that as someone who I think threw out a 
proposal for facilitators on this list. I think what you find is that if 
you plant your seedlings too close together, they all become thin and 
wiry and unproductive, and eventually get swamped by weeds. You need to 
actively thin out and select the most promising plants. Nature by itself 
is startling in the way it works.If I was selecting on Wikipedia, I'd 
select Wikipedia:Requests for mediation as the one to formalise, but 
that probably seems too obvious. It's certainly the one with the most 
chance of becoming ingrained in what we do. And it feels like an 
intuitive fit with how we work. Why we needed an advisory council, I 
have absolutely no idea.  We had a damn good mediator in Ryan 
Postlethwaite, and I think we could have success in sending policy 
issues to mediation, and let Ryan facilitate. He's bloody good at it. 
Who knows, in a year's time we could be electing mediators to steward 
our discussions, and arbitration might find itself on a steadier course too?